


The Absence of Discomfort

by BeastOfTheSea



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Gen, Genderswap, Severus Snape Lives, TW: transphobia (mentioned), Trans Female Character
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-08-09
Updated: 2015-08-09
Packaged: 2018-04-13 20:45:20
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 505
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4536723
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/BeastOfTheSea/pseuds/BeastOfTheSea
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>
  <i>She measures happiness, now, by the absence of discomfort.</i>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	The Absence of Discomfort

**Author's Note:**

> The author does not necessarily agree with the character's worldview or opinions. They're merely one version of worldviews and opinions which I think the character, based upon canon, might hold.

In a cramped, unpleasant apartment at the edge of Wizarding London, there lives a cramped, unpleasant woman.

She has no friends, no companions save her cauldrons, and no interest in gaining any. One might guess, observing her, that she has never had anything else. This is not true. Her life has been full of events and empty of happiness, and she is quite content to go on like this for all the decades until her inevitable death.

She measures happiness, now, by the absence of discomfort. She is no longer obliged to interact, year after year, with hordes of dirty, squealing, gleefully-ignorant imbeciles hellbent on playing around with love potions and high explosives because some idiot Headmaster of centuries past decided that the fine art of potion-crafting should be flung open to all, rather than restricted to the sober and worthy. She is no longer instantly shut up in the boxes of Slytherin, Half-Blood, or Death Eater, because she is no longer recognized. She is no longer bound to a love she failed and betrayed, a Lord she grew to hate and fight, and a chill manipulator who made of her a lyre. She considers nothing more precious than the absence of these pains.

It is a luxury, which she privately appreciates, that she may now appear as she truly wants to. There is very little difference between the sallow, sullen man who stalked the corridors of her old school and the sallow, sullen woman who scowls at her neighbors and shuts herself up alone. Certainly, her looks have not improved; if anything, it is an unfair world, and features that were ugly on a man are, on a woman, even worse. She does not do this out of vanity, or a desire to gain anyone else’s approval.

But it is the absence of discomfort, and it was a very old discomfort indeed. From her earliest memories, with her father screaming at her to stop acting like a girl and her mother demanding to know why she was so selfish that she couldn’t act more like a normal boy just to take a bit of the load off her poor, never-appreciated, so-sacrificing old mother; from her happiest memories, with the light of her life laughing uncomfortably and asking her why she had to act so girly sometimes, honestly, it was embarrassing; from her everyday memories, with the constant nagging dissonance between the body in her mirror, the voice from her throat, and the man reflected in the minds of those around her, and the self in her mind…

She has had very little happiness in her life, and she does not honestly value happiness. She has seen happiness lead others to madness, drug them into oblivion, or betray them to their deaths. All she truly values is safety, freedom from others, and the absence of discomfort.

She has that now. If she had to describe the sensation – she would say, she supposes, that this is what others mean when they say they are “finally happy”.

**Author's Note:**

> Please correct me if I've written anything in a problematic or incorrect way.


End file.
